Wearable Golf Sensor Points Out the Flaws in Your Swing

One more thing to break in frustration when you hit it in the water.

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Zepp

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By Paul Devlin

Jul 15, 2015

In golf there are mechanical players and feel players. I'm one of the latter. When I swing, I don't fight through a flurry of technical steps. I wait for the gentle tug at impact to tell me I've found the sweet spot, as if I were hitting a marshmallow. In my twenty years of playing, I've clung to the belief that overthinking strangles the fun out of the game. But with so many new swing-analysis gadgets being introduced, I finally gave in to curiosity.

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Zepp ($150) measures and records your swing through a small sensor that clips to the back of your glove and connects to a smartphone app. Input your age, height, grip style, and the make and model of your clubs, and after each swing you'll see a score and a 3D animation. The readout also shows your ideal club plane, swing speed, backswing versus downswing tempo, and hip rotation. Unfortunately it can't account for ball flight or the important factor of head movement.

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A few of my better shots received scores in the 80s. Some swings that registered in the low 90s, however, produced mediocre shots. This is not to say that the measurements were inaccurate, just that Zepp score and shot quality don't always correlate with my swing, which I don't bring back as far as would be ideal in the interest of accuracy. Zepp is probably more useful for very good players trying to improve minor aspects of their swing or for beginners whose habits aren't fully ingrained.

For any player the most useful aspect of Zepp is its record keeping. Along with weekly digests telling you how you rank against others, the app produces swing charts that can be shared, or kept to yourself if you don't want to lose Twitter followers. Each swing path can be compared to that of pro players whose swings all score perfect 95s. (For now the app includes Brendan Steele, Ryan Winther, and Keegan Bradley, all young and slim, leaving portly players such as me longing for the addition of a Craig Stadler.) While it's fun to compare yourself to them, Zepp offers a narrow range of shots for the pros, all at full power. I'd be more interested in seeing how a pro gets out of a bunker with a difficult lie, and then practicing that.

Even so, Zepp did help my game, mostly because it brought my experiences at the range home. Hours of practice were turned into a series of charts and images to obsess over. I watched my swings over and over. And while I am still a feel golfer, at one point, about a month after I started using Zepp, I startled myself when a little voice inside my head said "hand plane!" on the downswing. Wouldn't you know, it turned out to be a great shot.

This story appears in the July/August 2015 issue of Popular Mechanics.